What U.Va. Students Saw in Charlottesville

Riots broke out between alt-right and white supremacist demonstrators and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday.CreditCreditEdu Bayer for The New York Times

Charlottesville, Va. — The college town of Charlottesville, Va. became the scene of deadly chaos after a rally to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee was held there over the weekend.

In recent years, college towns and campuses have attracted divisive figures like Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who organized the rally, as youthful activism in the community all but guarantees protest and media coverage.

The New York Times reached out to University of Virginia students to reflect on the event.

Weston Gobar

History and Government, ’18

After this weekend, there should be no excuse for anyone to not take white supremacy seriously. Certainly the neo-Nazis who came to Charlottesville to intimidate minority communities take themselves seriously: They showed up with assault rifles and guns, wearing camouflage. They marched through a college campus with lit torches, yelling Nazi-era slogans and phrases like, “You will not replace us.”

On Saturday, as counterprotesters rallied near Emancipation Park, we were pelted with water bottles, chemicals, tear gas, rocks — really, anything the white supremacists could get their hands on.

Even after the crowds were dispersed and the governor declared a state of emergency, there were reports that neo-Nazis were headed to black, low-income neighborhoods around Charlottesville.

The intention of this “alt-right” rally was clear, and it had nothing to do with a statue. It was about intimidation. We need to call this violence — which culminated with the death of a 32-year-old woman — by its name: domestic terrorism.

Aryn A. Frazier

Politics and African-American and African Studies, ’17

On Friday night, I was locked in a church full of people, who were singing loudly to overpower the hate-filled chants of alt-right protesters carrying torches right outside the chapel doors.

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White supremacists marched at the University of Virginia on Friday night.CreditEdu Bayer for The New York Times

Still, I got up early on Saturday morning. Some friends and I had promised to be in downtown Charlottesville by 7 a.m. to help set up the counterprotest camp. We ate some fast food, moved tables, wrote the phone numbers of legal aid agencies on our arms in surgical marker in case we were arrested, and hung up “Black Lives Matter” signs. There were helicopters hovering overhead.

We left the park to go meet other student protesters, and walked by several alt-right groups, but we exchanged no words.

However, once we got to Emancipation Park, I found myself being talked at by a man wearing a red shirt. Red Shirt told me that Africa was for the black man, and America was for the white man. He seemed to have forgotten the brown men who were here long before either of our ancestors. He told a white woman, who was holding a sign promoting peace, that she was a race traitor, and despite her wide hips, he’d be willing to show her what a real man was all about. He spouted racist theories about the testosterone levels of black women and the difference in brain sizes between the races. I was unnerved; he truly believed what he was saying.

As more and more Confederate flag-waving men and women — but mostly, overwhelmingly, men — filed into the park with shields and guns, people who were not with the alt-right moved further into the streets. I stood on the pavement looking up at the white supremacists as they crowded together on a small slope, and I could see their world getting crowded, more claustrophobic. It’s their hatred, their refusal to leave their bubbles, that was really taking up space.

Each time one of the white supremacists threw a water bottle filled with a purplish chemical I couldn’t identify, or released pepper spray or smoke into the crowd, the counterprotesters retreated. We coughed into surgical masks or scarves and clutched at our throats, but then turned back for more.

I quickly learned to raise my poster board over my head as a cover, and I breathed in through my nose to protect my throat.

It was obviously a very dangerous situation. The news said it. The governor said it when he declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard. The worried text messages of family and friends said it. And a woman murdered in the street said it.

But for all the vitriol and hatred, there was also something deeply human happening in downtown Charlottesville. People were offering each other water, masks, earplugs and gloves. One kind woman came around to offer us locally grown cherry tomatoes. I, for my own peace of mind, have to believe that humanity’s good will eventually outweigh its bad. It won’t happen on its own, but with the help of people like those who were helping, or perhaps, watching from their homes in horror, thinking about the role they might play to stop something like this from happening again.

Isabella Ciambotti

Creative Writing, ’19

Violence and hate and blood, that’s what I saw. What happened in Charlottesville this past weekend wasn’t a rally. It was a riot.

I was on Market Street around 11:30 a.m. when a counterprotester ripped a newspaper stand off the sidewalk and threw it at alt-right protesters. I saw another man from the white supremacist crowd being chased and beaten. People were hitting him with their signs. A much older man, also with the alt-right group, got pushed to the ground in the commotion. Someone raised a stick over his head and beat the man with it, and that’s when I screamed and ran over with several other strangers to help him to his feet.

There was alt-right propaganda playing on speakers somewhere, and a woman was trying to sermonize into a microphone, but all of it was drowned out. Everyone was screaming obscenities. And everyone had cameras and iPhones out to record it all.

I know the cameras let people capture their individual perspectives, and some might not otherwise be seen. I filmed the protest for 15 minutes straight until my phone died. It was my shield, and my weapon of proof. But the filming en masse was a strange sort of horror. It seemed to precipitate a certain outcome — the kind that might be sensational enough to spread online. It was like fights in high school, where everyone gathered around holding their cameras, and there was an unconscious intensification of the violence.

There were absolutely groups of peaceful protesters in Charlottesville this past weekend, many making a mature show of resistance. But what I saw on Market Street didn’t feel like resistance. It felt like every single person letting out his or her own well of fear and frustration on the crowd.

As the alt-right crowd started to disperse, I followed them further down Market Street and saw the most significant organized group of counterprotestors I had seen all day. They were locked arm in arm, chanting, waving flags and signs. Some were shouting “Get out of our town!” at the alt-right as they marched. I joined in. We were only a few feet away from them, yelling, when a woman from their line turned to me, looked me dead in the eye and said, “I hope you get raped by a nigger.”

I would hear that line several more times before the end of the day.

Leanne Chia and Elizabeth Sines

University of Virginia School of Law, ’19

By the time we got to Emancipation Park, the police were dispersing the crowds. We walked to nearby McGuffey Park, which felt like a resistance camp at the end of the world.

No neo-Nazis were there: It was only counterprotesters, clergy and volunteers. People were passing out food and water, a D.J. was playing reggae music, and there were huge papier-mâché statues, giant paper cranes and protest signs hung up everywhere.

Leaders of the counterprotests asked us to mobilize: There were reports of people of color being attacked downtown. We began marching down the street, chanting, “When black lives are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!” and, “No racists, no KKK, no fascist USA!”

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Counterprotesters in Charlottesville on Saturday.CreditEdu Bayer for The New York Times

We seemed to be hundreds of people deep, but when we turned a street corner, there was another huge group of protesters walking to meet us. This incredibly inspiring moment brought tears to both of our eyes. We had walked about halfway up Water Street when we heard the screams. There was chaos as the crowd parted — people were darting off the road — and we both leapt to the side of the street just as a Dodge Challenger came barreling through.

The scene was horrific. People were having panic attacks, sobbing, bleeding and hugging. Those with huge banners shielded the injured as they received medical treatment. It was unclear whether the crowd was still in danger, but the alleyways were crowding up. We called a friend who lives close by and he took us in and gave us some water and food. We called our parents, we called our friends and then we sat in silence.

We witnessed domestic terrorism in our home. Neither of us regrets attending the rally, and we will keep showing up, every single time it’s necessary.

Nojan Rostami

Political and Social Thought, ’18

This weekend I sat at home in Northern Virginia, paralyzed, watching on television as white supremacists marched with torches outside the room I will be living in this year.

I’m one of 54 students who have the honor to live on University of Virginia’s Lawn — Thomas Jefferson’s original “academical village” — for our fourth year of college. This has always been a big deal for me; it’s something I’ve worked for since my first year. Students are chosen to live on the Lawn based on academic excellence, leadership and service.

The Lawn is the central nervous system of the university. It is also a space that was traditionally occupied by scions of slaveholding families. It used to be a place where people like me, a brown kid attending school on a financial aid scholarship, did not belong. Somehow I made it.

That small victory feels like a sick joke now.

Instead of saying that the university is going to keep me and my peers of color safe — or reassuring students that we belong on our campus and no one can take that from us — Teresa Sullivan, the president of University of Virginia, sent out a statement that reminded us that the college “is a public institution and follows state and federal law regarding the public’s right to access open spaces.” She wrote that the University of Virginia supports First Amendment rights but rejects “the ideology of intolerance and hate.”

I know the university needs to put out a measured response. I’m trying to be sympathetic to what is certainly a delicate situation for the administration.

But it’s hard to do that when I’m staying up on Saturday night fending off nightmares of armed militiamen dragging me out of my dorm room in the middle of the night, because did you see how those guys were able to just walk onto the Lawn like that? Those men beat and pepper-sprayed my friends and killed a young woman in the town I have come to call home.

Brendan Novak

Major undeclared, ’20

I’m the opinion editor of The Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper. Several weeks I ago I wrote a column arguing that the alt-right rally that took place over the weekend should be allowed to go on.

The way I see it, white supremacists — despite their irrefutably toxic ideology — are entitled to the same constitutional liberties as anyone else. I figured, maybe naïvely, that allowing the alt-right to assemble in public, under the scrutiny of daylight, would galvanize public opinion against their hateful beliefs. It would reveal the rotting foundation on which their ideology rests.

I feel foolish about that.

The alt-right has shown itself to be a domestic terrorist organization. Their use of intimidation, terror and violence in the pursuit of their goals more than justify this categorization.

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White supremacist demonstrators clashed with counterprotesters on Saturday.CreditEdu Bayer for The New York Times

On Friday night, we witnessed armed white supremacists march through university grounds with lit torches, threatening, harassing and physically assaulting students who were organizing peacefully — or who were just trying to go about their business despite the shocking events unfolding in their backyard.

This march and the alt-right’s actions on Saturday weren’t about discourse or peaceful assembly. They organized, applied for a permit and came to town with the full intention of inciting violence and agitating both the community and the national media. Richard Spencer has already vowed to come back “1,000 times if necessary” to “humiliate all those people who opposed us” and “win.”

I still believe in the sanctity of the First Amendment. True progress and healing can be achieved only through open, honest dialogue. But what happened in Charlottesville doesn’t, and perhaps never did, qualify as protected speech.

I was wrong about the nature of the alt-right, but I am encouraged by the widespread backlash and denunciation of their ideology. Despite the shocking, gut wrenching images coming out of my town, the solidarity on display gives me hope that we can work toward a more open and inclusive society.